Generally, a trailer includes a chassis, a set of wheels for rollably driving the chassis on the ground, and a rigid container carried by the chassis. The rigid container comprises a floor, a sidewall, an access door for loading/unloading materials into the container. The container may include a roof. Some trailers include moving floors for unloading the materials transported by the trailer. The moving floor includes a plurality of longitudinal slats provided in parallel, and movable back and forth in a reciprocating manner. While in motion to load and/or unload materials in the trailer alternate slats may move in opposite directions.
Trailers used for the transportation of loose and moist materials such as sand or soil etc. in countries where the temperature drops below the freezing point, encounter unloading problems when the moist materials freeze on the walls and floor of the trailer and become hard to unload. Furthermore, when the materials transported in the trailer freeze on moving slats, the moving slats may break and/or damage the driving mechanism that operates them when the mechanism is activated by the user. The common solution to this problem is to drive the trailers into warm buildings usually known as “hot boxes”, and to wait for the frozen materials to thaw.
In addition to being an expensive solution, the provision of such hot boxes is not possible at each unloading site. This solution is slow, especially since the heat takes a long time to arrive at the slats. It is also inefficient, as it requires heating the entire trailer before reaching the floor and inner walls of the trailer. A substantive amount of heat is also lost to the atmosphere when opening the doors for the trailer to drive in and out of the hot box.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a method for thawing frozen materials transported in a trailer in an efficient and quick way.